The Utility Center is a central resource for various utilities and apps that I highly recommend. These programs are all categorized and each has a brief explanation. I will frequently post updates of new additions to the Utility Center.
Windows Info
Process Explorer – this app was previously mentioned in an article. It’s a souped up version of the basic Task Manager, available free, from Microsoft.
WinDirStat – Running out of space on your hard drive? Not sure why? Run this program for a graphical representation of your hard drive and the space being used. Free of charge.
System Cleaners
CleanUp! – this program has been mentioned in the past as a good way to clean up your hard drive. It can scan though a lot of common areas looking for temporary files, cached files and other junk. This is definitely a good program to have.
HijackThis – this stand-alone app will scan your machine for browser hijacks and system start-up hijacks; it’s great for removing start-up programs.
Website Tools
Notepad++ – This is an excellent choice for a free text editor. It like the built-in Notepad for Window, but better (hence its name); and, it’s free. One of the best things about this program is that it’s fast, so it’s not a strain to right-click a file and click Edit in Notepad++.
WhoisThisDomain – this stand-alone app will allow you to query the WHOIS databases for domain info; you can query domains in bulk.
Networking / Transfer Tools
FileZilla – this is a very reliable FTP program — and it’s completely free. I highly recommend it for any FTP use. It has n account manager that lets you save passwords and addresses.
PuTTY – this is for you SSHers out there. It’s lightweight (as in…fits on a floppy…but who uses those still). This program is a simple stand-alone telnet/SSH program. It’s easy to use an has been featured in a previous article.
Media Tools
Audacity – This is the obvious choice for simple audio editing. It’s free and easy to use. It’s stable and I’ve recommended it in the past for creating your own MP3 ring tones.BitPim – this program is a great one for cell phones. If you are able to connect your phone to your computer (either hard wire or wireless), you can use the bad boy to transfer media over to the phone. It’s been mentioned in the past in a detailed tutorial on putting MP3s on the LG Chocolate as ringtones.
IrfanView – this program goes back to my days with Windows 95. This is an excellent image viewer…a perfect replacement to the default view in Windows. You can open plenty of different image formats as well as play audio formats. This program has been written about before for ability to take great screenshots.
Winamp – this is a great, lightweight, fast audio player. It’s small, can be skinned and launches quick. It can play music and videos and there are plenty of add-ons to it.
General Time Savers
7-Zip – this is a free alternative to Winzip or WinRAR. It’s so good because…it’s free. It supports plenty of formats for compression and decompression.
Launchy – this is an excellent time saver. It’s a keystroke launcher to launch programs…. and just about everything else. Just run it, hit Alt + Spacebar and enter in a program name, document name, music….or even search Google from it.
Power Defragmenter – Need to defrag? Don’t bother with te built-in utility. Power Defragmenter uses the power of Contig, another great Sysinternals app, to get the job done. It’s basically a GUI for the CLI-only contig. I’ve also written about it in the past.
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